Thursday, September 29, 2016

In the lifetime of the older ones among us, freedom of
expression in India first became a hot item with the Salman Rushdie affair,
when in 1988, his novel The Satanic
Verses was banned. This was done by Rajiv Gandhi’s Congress government at
the request of Muslim leader Syed Shahabuddin, in exchange for the latter’s
calling off a Muslim march on Ayodhya (then a hotspot because of the
temple/mosque controversy) expected to cause bloodshed.

For the younger generation, the main events were the
withdrawal of A.K. Ramanujan’s essay 300
Ramayanas from Delhi University’s syllabus in 2011 under Hindu pressure;
and Penguin Delhi publisher’s withdrawal of Wendy Doniger’s book The Hindus: An Alternative History in
2014, likewise under Hindu pressure.

Neither document was judicially banned, but the Hindu
plaintiffs wielded an article of law as threatening argument, and this could
not be ignored: Section 295A of the Indian Penal Code. Why is this article
there, and what role does it play in India’s public life?

Looking
in from outside: the Doniger affair

In November 2014, at its annual conference, the American Academy of
Religion (AAR) held a panel discussion on censorship in India under Section
295A of the Indian Penal Code, itself occasioned by the Penguin publisher’s
withdrawal under Hindu pressure of Wendy Doniger’s book The Hindus: an Alternative History. This translated into a section
of the latest issue of the Journal of the AAR (JAAR) with four contributors and
a response by Wendy Doniger. It addresses “the true source of the conflict,
section 295A of the Indian Penal Code”. (Pennington 2016:323 )

This article 295A criminalizes “outraging the religious feelings of any
class of Indian citizens”. Dina Nath Batra, former national director of the
Hindu Nationalist organization Vidya Bharati, had entered a lawsuit against the
publisher under Section 295A. The latter recognized that the case had a solid
legal footing and decided to avoid defeat by settling out of court. He agreed
to withdraw the book from circulation and pulp all remaining copies. Not that
any book actually got pulped: before they could be physically withdrawn, “all extant
copies were quickly bought up from the bookstores” (Doniger 2016:364) because
of the sudden free publicity.

While many academics accused Penguin of cowardice, Wendy Doniger
understood that they had acted under threat of the law, and empatically
denounced Section 295A: “The true villain was the Indian law that makes it a
criminal rather than a civil offence to publish a book that offends any Hindu,
a law that jeopardizes the physical safety of any publisher, no matter how
ludicrous the accusation brought against a book.” (Doniger 2014, quoted by
Pennington 2016:330)

This statement is entirely correct, except for one word. Doniger is being
brazenly partisan and incorrect where she claims that the law prohibits every
book that “offends any Hindu”.
Formally, it does not discriminate and applies to all Indians regardless of
religion. Historically, as we shall see, the law was enacted to prohibit books
that offended Muslims, and to silence Hindus. Her insinuation that this law has
a pro-Hindu bias, giving Hindus a privileged protection that it withholds from
others, is simply false in both respects. It fits in with the common narrative
that India is a crypto-“Hindu Rashtra” oppressing the minorities, when in fact
the minorities are often privileged by law vis-à-vis the Hindus.

Likewise, in Pennington’s paraphrase (2016:329), Martha Nussbaum claims
that in India, such defamation laws “are used primarily by majority groups to
bludgeon minorities”. This is wildly untrue (though it is true in the other
successor-state of British India, viz. Pakistan), as will become clear when we
see how Section 295A came into being.

Reactions
against book withdrawals and censorship

But first a word
about the significant reactions to this famous case of book-burning. The
recent changes in syllabi and the objections to books by pro-Hindu activists,
both phenomena being summed up in the single name of Dina Nath Batra (who is
also editor of some schoolbooks), have met with plenty of vocal reprimands and
petitions in protest, signed by leading scholars in India and abroad.

Thus,
at the European Conference for South Asia Studies in Zürich, July 2014, we were
all given a petition to sign in support of Wendy Doniger’s book The Hindus: an Alternative History
against the publisher’s withdrawal under Batra’s judicial challenge. (Full
disclosure: I signed, with heartfelt conviction.) The general opinion among
educated people, widely expressed, was to condemn all attempts at book-banning.
Unlike other petitions, this one did focus on the negative role of Section 295.

To
be sure, most intellectuals’ indignation was selective. There have indeed been
cases where they have failed to come out in defence of besieged authors. No
such storms of protest were raised when Muslims or Christians had books banned,
or even when they assaulted the writers. Thus, several such assaults happened
on the authors and publisher of the Danish Mohammed cartoons of 2006, yet at
its subsequent annual conference, the prestigious and agenda-setting AAR hosted
a panel about the cartoons where every single participant supported the Muslim
objections to the cartoons, though to different degrees, and none of them fully
defended freedom of expression. (Another panel there was devoted to lambasting
the jihadwatch.org website by Robert Spencer and Pamela Geller, both targets of
death threats and at least one effective but failed attempt on their lives, but
not defended at the AAR panel by anyone.)

In
their own internal functioning too, the AAR scholars and Indologists don’t put
a premium on the freedom to express dissident opinions. Here I speak from
experience, having been banned from several forums where Wendy Doniger and some
of her prominent supporters were present and gave their tacit consent. (Elst
2012:350-385) The most high-profile target of this policy has probably been
Rajiv Malhotra, a sharp critic of Indologist mores and anti-Hindu bias, some of
whose experiences in this regard have been fully documented. (Malhotra 2016)

It
is entirely reasonable for India-watchers, like for freedom-loving Indians, to deplore this law
and the cases of book-banning it has justified; but less so for people who
chose not to speak out on the occasion of earlier conspicuous incidents of
book-banning. Where was Wendy Doniger when Salman Rushdie's book The Satanic
Verses was banned? At any rate, many Indian secularists, who mostly
enjoy the support and sympathy of those American academics, upheld the ban,
which was decreed by a self-declared secularist Prime Minister (Rajiv
Gandhi) and ruling party (Congress). Where were they when demands were
made to ban Ram Swarup’s Hindu View of
Christanity and Islam, or when the Church had Dan Brown’s The Da Vinci Code banned?

American Indologists including Wendy Doniger have always
condoned religious discrimination on condition that Hindus are at the
receiving end; they only protest when Hindus show initiative. And much as I
deplore Dina Nath Batra’s initiative, it meant at least that Hindus were not
taking Doniger’s insults lying down. Briefly: while everything pleads against this
act of book-burning, the American India-watchers are not very entitled to
their much-publicized indignation.

The
point is that the intellectuals’ selective indignation shows very well where
real authority lies. Threats of violence are, of course, highly respected by
them. The day Hindus start assaulting writers they don’t like, you will see
eminent historians turning silent about Hindu censorship, or even taking up its
defence -- for that is what actually happens in the case of Islamic threats and
censorship. Even more pervasive is the effect of threats to their careers. You
will be in trouble if you utter any “Islamophobic” criticism of Islamic censorship,
but you will earn praise if you challenge even proper judicial action against
any anti-Hindu publications. This, then, safely predicts the differential
behaviour of most intellectuals vis-à-vis free speech.

The Doniger affair: what is in it for
the Hindus?

For the Hindus, the book withdrawal was a Pyrrhic victory. The publicity
they gained worldwide was entirely negative, and it corroborated their recently-manufactured
image as authoritarian and intolerant. The decision was also ineffectual, for
in the days of the internet, it remained easy to access a soft copy of the
book. The Hindus concerned also kind of admitted that they were unable to fight
back with arguments.

Yet, they did have the arguments. A list of the numerous factual errors
in Doniger's book has been compiled by Vishal Agarwal, an Indo-American medical
engineer and Sanskritist (2014, but already on-line since 2010). Most of all,
he has shown how her book's treatment of Hinduism is unconscientious
and flippant to a degree that would never be accepted from a professor of
her rank (Mircea Eliade Professor at Chicago University, top of the world) for
more established religions. In the reprint of her book through another
publisher (Speaking Tiger, Delhi 2015), she didn’t deign to acknowledge this
work nor to make any correction.

This is a serious aspect of the case that Western academics and their
Indian cheerleaders have strictly kept the lid on. On the contrary, Pennington
(2016:330) claims that the book was lambasted “even when a scholar is
demonstrating what is manifestly true based on her research”.

We can vaguely get an idea of Hindu opinion in India about Doniger’s
book through the sparse comments by the Hindi-language press. S. Shankar in Dainik Jagran “charged Doniger with a
familiar set of shortcomings: overlooking standard classical works, exoticizing
the Hindu tradition, writing history in league with India’s Marxist historians,
and relying largely on foreign rather than Indian scholarship”. (Pennington 2016:331)
In Shankar’s own words, she shows a “negligent and arrogant mindset… born of
colonial and racist thinking”. Vivek Gumaste at Rediff.com asserts that “this
is not a pure battle for free speech”, but “a parochial ideological ambush
masquerading as one” (Pennington 2016:331). He calls it “subtle
authoritarianism” out to “suppress the Hindu viewpoint”. (quoted by Pennington 2016:331)

To an extent this
is simply true, there is no level playing field, and the American academics
including Wendy Doniger herself have done their best never to give the Hindus a
fair hearing. On the other hand, this power equation is the Hindus' own doing.
They have never invested in scholarship, and so they had to take umbrage behind
a threatened judicial verdict now that they had the chance. Here, Hindus only
pay the price for their self-proclaimed vanguard's non-performance during the
last decades.

Building a scholarly challenge to the present academic consensus is a
long-term project that admits of no shortcuts. By going to court and twisting
Penguin's arm, Hindus think they have scored a clever victory, but in fact,
they have only demeaned Hinduism. Prominent Hindus from the past would not be
proud of Hinduism suppressing freedom of expression: great debaters
like Yajñavalkya, the Buddha, Badarayana, Shankara and Kumarila Bhatta.

Ancient
Indian thought was never divided in box-type orthodoxies on the pattern of
Christians vs. Muslims or Catholics vs. Protestants. This is only a Western
projection, borrowed as somehow more prestigious by the Indian “secularists”,
who impose this categorization on the Indian landscape of ideas. At any rate,
the vibrant interaction of ancient India’s intellectual landscape, where free
debate flourished, was nothing like the modern situation where Doniger’s own
school has locked out the Hindu voice and the latter has reactively demonized
her and thrown up hurdles against expressions of her viewpoint.

But the taste of
victory had become so unusual for Hindus that even many people who should have
known better, have cheered the book’s withdrawal. (see
Elst 2015:74-87) It was not the best response, but at least it was a response. And of
course, Art. 295A may be a bad thing, but as long as it is on the statute
books, it should count for Hindus as much as for Muslims and Christians.

History of Section 295A

Section 295A was not
instituted by Hindu society, but against it. It was imposed by the British on
the Hindus in order to shield Islam from criticism. Thus, it is truthfully said
on the digplanet.com/wiki website,
consulted on 5 August 2016, under the entry Rangila
Rasul (see below): “In
1927, under pressure from the Muslim community, the administration of the British
Raj
enacted Hate Speech Law Section 295(A)”.

The reason for its
enactment was a string of murders of Arya Samaj leaders who polemicized against
Islam. This started with the murder of Pandit Lekhram in 1897 by a Muslim
because Lekhram had written a book criticizing Islam. A particularly
well-publicized murder took place in December 1926, eliminating an important
leader, Swami Shraddhananda, writer of Hindu
Sangathan, Saviour of the Dying Race (1926), next to VD Savarkar’s Hindutva (1924) the principal
ideological statement of Hindu Revivalism. (However, the trigger to the murder lay
elsewhere, viz. the protection he gave to a family of converts from Islam to
Hinduism.) Moreover, there was commotion at the time concerning a very
provocative subject: Mohammed’s sex life, discussed by Mahashay Rajpal in his
(ghost-written) book Rangila Rasul,
more or less “Playboy Mohammed”, a response to a Muslim pamphlet disparaging
Sita as a prostitute. Rajpal would be murdered in 1929.

Wendy Doniger and
the four authors who wrote about the origin and meaning of Section295A for the
Journal of the AAR strictly keep the lid on this crucial fact. None of the
contributors has let on that the trigger for this legislation was repeated
unidirectional communal murder, viz. of Arya Samaj leaders by Muslims, nor that
it was meant to appease the Muslim community. None of them so much as hints at
this. Anantanand Rambachan (2016:367) even alleges that “the aggressive party
was the Arya Samaj”. No, the Arya Samaj took the initiative of criticizing
Islam, an attitude which psychologists might call “aggression” in a
metaphorical sense. But aggression in the sense of inflicting violence on the
other party was one-sidedly Muslim.

And even verbally,
the Arya Samaj was not really the “aggressive” party. In Shraddhananda’s
authoritative biography, not by a Hindu, we read that “some of his writings
about the Muslims expressed harsh and provocative judgments. But (….) they were
invariably written in response to writings or pronouncements of Muslims which
either vehemently attacked Hinduism, the Arya Samaj, and the Swami himself, or
which supported methods such as (…) the killing of apostates, and the use of
devious and unfair means of propaganda.” He himself “never advocated unfair,
underhand or violent methods”. (Jordens 1981: 174-175)

C.S. Adcock
(2016:341) comes closest to the truth by writing that “polemics continued to
cause resentment and increasingly, it seemed, serious violence”. For an
academic writer on the origins of Section 295A, it is bizarre that he has so
little grasp of the basic data and doesn’t know the nature of the “seeming”
violence. And even he falsely insinuates that this violence was symmetrical, avoids
mentioning the deliberate murders (as opposed to emotional riots), and hides
the Muslim identity of the culprits. When Hindus allege that Indology today is
systematically anti-Hindu, they can cite this as an example.

The British finally
resolved to curb this form of unrest. While their justice system duly sentenced
the murderers, they also decided to make an end to the religious polemics that
had “provoked” them. After the Mutiny of 1857, Queen Victoria had solemnly
committed the British administration to avoiding and weeding out insults to the
native religions. However, the right to religious criticism had been taken for
granted, on a par with the right of Western missionaries to criticize native
religions in a bid to convince their adherents that they would be better off
joining Christianity.

For example, in
1862, the magistrate sitting in jugdment upon a case against a reformist who
had criticized the caste-conscious Vallabhacharya Vaishnava community, upheld
this right: “It is the function and the duty of the press to intervene,
honestly endeavouring by all the powers of argument, denunciation and ridicule,
to change and purify the public opinion.” (quoted by Adcock 2016:345) He
“upheld the importance of religious critique, and held public opinion in
religious matters to be susceptible to reasoned argument.” (Adcock 2016:345)

In Britain, reasoned
debates between worldviews flourished, for public opinion was held to be
“susceptible to reasoned argument”. Initially, the colonial authorities treated
Indians the same way. But this assessment was reversed by Section 295A, and quite
deliberately.

This process had
started a bit earlier, in a case against Arya Samaj preacher Dharm Bir in 1915.
Ten Muslims were sentenced for rioting, but Dharm Bir was also charged and “a
judge was brought in who could assure conviction”. (Adcock 2016:346) He was
duly found guilty, then under section 298 for “using offensive phrases and
gestures (…) with the deliberate intention of wounding the religious feelings”
of another community; and under Section 153, for “wantonly provoking the riot
which subsequently occurred”. (Adcock 2016:345)

As described by
Adcock (2016:346), the British twisted the existing laws into prohibiting any
religious polemic: “Because religion is ‘rooted in the sentiments’, the judge
concluded, religion is likely to provoke a riot, and that is all it can do.
Religious debate is pointless and therefore unjustifiable; the right publicly
to controvert arguments therefore does not properly extend to religion. To
enter into religious debate is nothing but a provocation, an act calculated to
arouse hatred. Therefore, it is intolerable.”

Note that the
British public would never have stood for such a reasoning. But what was
unacceptable to them, and not even countenanced for the Indian subjects fifty
years earlier, was imposed on the colonial underlings during the last phase of
the British Raj. And has remained with us since.

The murder of
Shraddhanada finally made the British rulers turn this attitude into law: “In
1927, section 295A was enacted to extend the ease with which ‘wounding
religious feelings’ by verbal acts could be prosecuted.” (Adcock 2016:345) Apart
from punishing the murderer, they sought to punish Shraddhanada as well, retro-actively
and postumously.

Counterproductive

The British were
not so much interested in justice, they merely wanted peace and quiet so the
economy could flourish. The Arya Samaj was not doing anything that the
Christian missionaries had not been doing (and are still doing today) to the
populations they wanted to convert, viz. trying to convince them that their
native religion was unwholesome and wrong. This implied saying negative things
about that religion, or as the emotion-centric phrase now goes: “insulting” it.

But if the Arya
Samaj’s words provoked unwanted
Muslims deeds, they were part of the
problem and had to be remedied. However, in spite of this intention to prevent
riots, the new law did not end the recurring Muslim murders of Arya Samaj
leaders until WW2 nor the concomitant riots, as discussed by Dr. Ambedkar (1940:156).
It was the Partition that broke the Arya Samaj’s back, driving it from its
power-centre in West Panjab with the Dayanand Anglo-Vedic College in Lahore. After
Independence, anti-Islamic polemics were blackened as “communal” by an
increasingly powerful “secularism”, and thus abandoned. But
Section 295A had little to do with this.

More fundamentally,
this law put a premium on violence by making it the best proof that the
statements prosecuted had indeed “provoked” violence. It “extended the
strategic value of demonstrating that passions had been aroused that threatened
the public peace, in order to induce the government to take legal action
against one’s opponents. Section 295A thus gave a fillip to the politics of
religious sentiment.” (Adcock 2016:345)

And so: “When
coordinated acts of violence are justified as the inevitable result of hurt
feelings, legal precautions against violent displays of religious passion may
be said to have backfired.” (Adcock 2016:347) This present-day effect of
Section 295A could easily convince the scholars to sign a petition against this
undeniably despotic and un-secular laws. Still, it is odd that with their
widespread anti-Hindu and pro-minority bias, they object to a law originally
enacted to shield a minority from criticism and to punish Hindu words for
Muslim murders.

Though originally and for a long time serving to shield Islam, Hindus
gradually discovered that they too could use the religiously neutral
language of this Section to their seeming advantage. Christians as well
have invoked it, e.g. to ban Dan Brown's novel The Da Vinci Code. This
creates a sickening atmosphere of a pervasive touch-me-not-ism, with every
community outdoing the other in being more susceptible to having its sentiments
hurt.

Rationale for Section 295A

When
Batra and other Hindus put publishers under pressure to withdraw Wendy
Doniger’s book, or earlier, A.K. Ramanujan’s Three Hundred Ramayanas, the publishers buckled under the fear of having
to face trial under Art. 295A, as well as under their regard for the Hindu
public’s purchasing power. Apart from ideological factors, entrepreneurs also
take into account the purely commercial aspect of a controversy. In this case,
they reckoned with the only power that Hindus have: their numbers.

But
the Hindu instigators did not inspire “fear”, and definitely did not have the
backing of political authority. This all happened when the Congress Party was
in power. It is not entirely unheard of that Indian judges are on the take, but
in most cases, the Indian Judiciary is independent, so a Government sometimes
has to suffer verdicts not to its liking. Thus, Narendra Modi was repeatedly
cleared by the Courts from alleged guilt in the post-Godhra riots of 2002 while
Congress, which invested heavily in anti-Modi propaganda, was in power.

It
is strange how fast people can forget. Modi’s BJP has only very recently come
to power: in May 2014, after ten years in the opposition. At the time of the
Ramanujan and Doniger controversies, Congress was safely at the helm. If the
publishers were in awe of any powers-that-be, it must have been of the Congress
“secularists”. So, regardless of the prevailing regime,
Section 295A by itself exercises a pro-censorship influence.

Now that the BJP is safely in power, we find it is
not making any move to abolish Section 295A. This is partly because it has
apparently resolved not to touch any communally sensitive issue with a
barge-pole, committing itself instead to safely secular “development”, but
partly for a deeper reason.

The colonial view, ultimately crystallized in Section
295A, came to the fore after the Mutiny of 1857, which had formally erupted
over seemingly irrational religious sensitivities: objections to the use of
cows’ fat or pigs’ fat, taboo to Hindus c.q. Muslims. India was reorganized as
an Empire ruled by the Queen of Britain, henceforth also the Empress of India.
She made a solemn declaration to win over the Indians: “Queen Victoria’s declaration
of religious neutrality (…) explicitly promised to refrain from interference in
the religious beliefs and practices of Indian natives. (…) What provoked
Victoria’s declaration was the assumption that religion in India was the source
of volatile passions that were a threat to the peace.” (Vishwanath 2016:353)

This position was colonial par excellence,
contrasting Britons capable of reasoned debate with natives who were prisoners
of emotions and superstitions. Yet, it had a kernel of truth: not that Indians
were more emotional or superstitious than Britons, but they seemed to have an
aversion to religious debate. 19th-century Europeans were keen to
know the world, and everywhere the conquerors of foreign lands were followed by
students of the newfound languages and cultures. They prided themselves on this
curiosity and thought it typical for the indolent natives that they did not
have it. Thus, the early Indian pioneers of linguistics were greatly admired
and accepted as inspiration for the budding science of linguistics, yet it was
also noticed that they had not shown any interest in foreign languages. Thus,
though Panini lived close to the Iranian- and Burushaski-speaking peoples, he
is not known to have used their languages in his linguistic theories.

So, it was only a logical extension to apply this
to religion. Consider the native welcome given to the Syrian Christians in
Kerala, the Zoroastrians in Gujarat, and other refugees: no questions were
asked about the contents of their faith. They were perfectly allowed to
practise their traditions (within the bounds of “morality”, as the Constitution
still says, e.g. the prevailing taboo on cow-slaughter, which they had not
known in Syria or Iran), to honour any Prophets or Gurus or Scriptures they
wanted, to build any churches or temples they chose, yet no interest was paid
to what exactly their religion was about. This was simply not the business of
the natives, who were satisfied with practising their own traditions. Not even
purely for scholarly sake did Hindus or Muslims show any interest in other
religions; al-Biruni and Dara Shikoh being the exceptions that prove the rule.

Colonial
prejudices are not always incorrect, but this one really does injustice to the
average Hindu, who is more interested in other religions than was the case
among Christians until recently. But perhaps they show less of a tendency to
criticize. From experience, I tend to think that their natural tolerance as
shown towards the refugees is not due to indifference and smugness but to
open-mindedness.

For Western
religious converts like Saint Paul (Judaism to Christianity), Saint Augustine (Manicheism
to Catholicism) or John Newman (Anglicanism to Catholicism), it would be an
insult to deny the role of reason in their religious development, or to say
that “to enter into religious debate is nothing but a provocation, an act
calculated to arouse hatred”, as the British judge had told the Arya Samaj in
1915. But the colonial view crystallized in Section 295A did hold the Indians
to be a different race, less rational and not to be trusted with debate, but
fortunately also disinclined to such debate. So, it would only be a slight
exaggeration of a tendency already present in Indian culture to outlaw
religious debate.

That, indeed, is how many Indian secularists and
their allies in Western academe now justify this continued muzzling of debate: “In India, the notion that to be truly tolerant in
religion is to refrain from criticism of religion is a widespread secularist
ideal.” (Pennington 2016:346)

Secularism

To assert that refraining from religious criticism
is a “secularist ideal”, brings in the S-word. This would trigger a far longer
discussion than we are prepared for here. But because it now serves as the new
justification for the colonial Section 295A, at least this.

For a scholar, it is very poor to use this word as
if it hadn’t acquired a meaning in India (since Jawaharlal Nehru, ca. 1951)
totally at variance with its original Western meaning. This should be obvious
to whomever studies the types of Indians calling themselves secularist, and
those lambasted as anti-secular: “The concept of
Secularism as known to the modern West is dreaded, derided and denounced in the
strongest terms by the foundational doctrines of Christianity and Islam. (…) It
is, therefore, intriguing that the most fanatical and fundamentalist adherents
of Christianity and Islam in India – Christian missionaries and Muslim mullahs
– cry themselves hoarse in defence of Indian Secularism, the same way as the votaries
of Communist totalitarianism coming out vociferously in defence of Democracy.”
(Goel 1998:vii)

Thus, in the West, secularism means that all citizens
are equal before the law, regardless of their religion; or what Indians call a
Common Civil Code. In India, by contrast, all secularists swear by the
preservation of the present system of separate religion-based Personal Laws,
though they prefer to avoid the subject, hopefully from embarassment at the
contradiction. And all Indian secularists swear by the preservation of
constitutional, legal and factual discriminations against the Hindu majority.
(In case you have recently lived on another planet and don’t believe that there
are such discriminations, one example: the Right to Education Act 2006, which
imposes some costly duties on schools except minority schools, has led to the
closure of hundreds of Hindu schools.)

Likewise, in the West, the enactment of secularism
went hand in hand with deepening criticism of religion, which was pushed from
its pedestal and recognized as just another fallible human construct, open to
questioning and criticism. In India, by contrast, secularists cheer for the
application, formally or in spirit, of Section 295A to outlaw religious criticism
– except when it is Hinduism that gets criticized. And that is why the AAR
scholars, in solidarity with their Indian secularist friends, have never moved
a finger about minority-enforced censorship but made a mountain out of the
Doniger molehill. Here, they vehemently denounced the clumsy Hindu attempt at
banning an otherwise poor book that, to them, has the cardinal virtue of riding
roughshod over Hindu self-perception.

Conclusion

All the Hindu justifications of the "withdrawal"
of Wendy Doniger’s book amount to: "Freedom of speech does not mean
freedom to insult." This just shows the speakers' thoughtlessness and illiteracy.
All debates about book-banning, or at least one of the contending parties in
them, will at some point come up with George Orwell's famous observation: “If liberty means anything at all, it means the right to tell
people what they do not want to hear.” Freedom of speech
doesn't mean much if it doesn't imply the freedom to offend. If the freedom to
insult were forbidden, than anything meaningful would be found to displease at
least someone somewhere and thus be forbidden.

Moreover, many
lambasters (including Wendy Doniger) honestly feel that they have done a fair
job and not "insulted" anyone. So, even the term "insult"
is merely subjective: "Insulting is everything that anyone feels insulted
by." This would make the worst touch-me-not the arbiter of whether books
are allowed to be published.

So, down with censorship or any procedure amounting to
the same, including forcing publishers to withdraw their publications with the
threat of Section 295A. Down with censorship laws. Freedom of expression is a fundamental
element of democracy, a precondition for making it possible at all. Equal
participation in decision-making implies equal access to information and
opinions, rather than one group deciding what another group is allowed to read
and write.

As for the stated fear that if “insults” are not
curbed by law, soon the atmosphere will be filled with unbearable swearing in
the guise of “criticism”: India has done without such censorship laws for
thousands of years, and the amount of insults in the religious field was not
appreciably worse than in the colonial period or today. Such exaggerated fears
can be laid to rest by civil society without state interference. People will
give each other feedback, and they themselves will keep criticism and “insults”
within reasonable bounds.

Finally, the possibility has to be faced that the
fanaticism potentially emanating from certain worldviews has something to do
with the contents of these worldviews themselves. Not every religion is equally
prone to get provoked to violence by criticism. I make bold to say that,
through a felicitous coincidence, the religions originating in India are quite
capable of solving ideological differences of opinion peacefully.

Bibliography

Adcock, C.S., 2016: “Violence, passion,
and the law: a brief history of section 295A and its antecedents”,Journal of the American Academy of
Religion, June 2016, vol 84, 337-351.

Agarwal, Vishal, 2014: The New Stereotypes of Hindus in Western Indology, Hinduworld
Publ., Wilmington DE.

Ambedkar, Bhimrao Ramji, 1940: Thoughts on Pakistan, republished as vol.8 of Ambedkar’s Writings and Speeches, published by the
Government of Maharashtra, 1986-90.

Thursday, September 15, 2016

The School of Oriental and African Studies (SOAS), together
with the neighbouring British Museum, is a centre of Orientalism in its proper
sense, viz. the study of “Oriental” civilizations. Exactly one hundred years
ago, it came about as the headquarters of what Edward Said notoriously called
“Orientalism”, meaning the colonial Empire’s project of pigeon-holing every
Oriental culture in order better to dominate it.

At that same time, on the enemy side in the ongoing First
World War, the German scholar Max Weber published one of the most influential
studies of the Orient, focusing on the question of the economic views and
implications of the world religions, and especially the part about Hinduism and
Buddhism. It sought to understand why not they but Protestantism had presided
over the techno-scientific and economic breakthrough to industrial capitalism
and modernity.

Some fifty people gathered in the SOAS’s Brunei Gallery
Lecture Theatre for the centenary of both SOAS and Max Weber’s work. As for
SOAS’s anniversary, chairman Peter Flügel quoted viceroy Lord Curzon calling
SOAS at its time of conception the “necessary furniture of empire”, for
“Oriental studies are an imperial obligation”. This is a key citation in Edward
Said’s “Orientalism” thesis, viz. that Orientalist scholarship was essentially a
strategic investment by the colonial establishment.

As for Weber, his view is fairly representative of general
Western opinion (partly by having created it) regarding the Hindu-Buddhist
counterpart to the role of the Protestant work ethic in the genesis of
capitalism. He had concluded that the Orientals certainly succeeded in
launching a mercantile capitalism but, partly because of their otherworldly
religion, failed in creating modern industrial capitalism. However, he also had
testified in 1916 how, in the middle of WW1, he had found his study of the
Hindu-Buddhist worldviews invigorating. We were going to recreate some of that
spirit.

Romila Thapar

The keynote lecture was given by the octogenarian historian
Prof. Romila Thapar. She looked quite good for her age, elegant and dignified
in her sari. She thus exemplified Sita Ram Goel’s observation that secularists
often display a sincere affection for traditional Hindu culture, all the more
striking when supposed Hindutva militants go all out for Westernization, from
the British-style RSS uniform and brass bands to the present-day
BJP-facilitated guzzling down of American economic mores and cultural
mannerisms. The secularists of the older generation are culturally still very
Indian, and have a traditional pride presenting an unassuming alternative
identity to the present idealization of Western examples. (I am reminded of her
colleague Prof. Irfan Habib’s proud old-Marxist rejection of US patronage,
contrasting to the complete conceptual as well as outwardly Americanization of
the younger generation of secularists and Ambedkarites.)

It transpired that she had a vivid interest in Weber’s work
regarding India, whom she read some forty years ago. As no Indian scholar of the
younger generation showed a similar interest, she had graciously accepted the
invitation from SOAS. The institution was familiar ground to her. She earned
her PhD degree at SOAS with a dissertation on Ashoka’s inscriptions, published
as an authoritative book in 1961. (Also present here was retired Oxford
Buddhologist Prof. Richard Gombrich, who strongly disagrees with her on those
inscriptions, which he doesn’t consider “secular” at all, but instead
outspokenly promoting the specific Buddhist worldview.) She immediately
established a good rapport with the audience, speaking slowly with a clear and
authoritative diction, as an experienced professor should.

She started with noticing the obvious: that Max Weber’s
research on Indian history and society relied heavily on colonial writings
available then, and necessarily differed from the present-day theories. Being a
prisoner of the colonial view, he did not thematize the implications of colonialism itself (unlike Karl Marx, who
wrote about colonialism in Ireland and India). Weber reproduced and refined the
colonial theory of “Oriental despotism”, which militated against the individual
freedom and social mobility needed for the genesis of modern capitalism.

Religions and their
work ethic

Weber remains most famous for his thesis that the Protestant
work ethic in the UK, the US and Germany was responsible for the rise of
industrial capitalism. Weber argued that capitalism could not have originated
in the India because of its lack of fraternization between different groups
(esp. during apprenticeship, where Indian pupils were confined to their caste
environment)), its lack of social mobility, its cultural depreciation of
commerce and its otherworldly religious orientation. He did not give sufficient
consideration to the Jains, whose trading activity, money-lending and
renunciation of enjoying their profits come closest to the Protestant work
ethic, though in passing he admits they had potential. In precolonial times,
China and India were the main economies in Eurasia and practised mercantile
capitalism. But they missed the shift to industrial capitalism, which took
place in Europe.

But then, Weber neglected the specific 18th-19th century
history of India and the role of both native and colonial capitalism therein.
More generally, he treated Hindu culture as a monolithic whole, insufficiently
considering the differences between classes and regions, and not taking the
changes between the different periods into account. In a borrowed distortion
typical for the Orientalists of the colonial period, he based his understanding
of Hinduism only on texts, esp. the Vedic corpus to whom different groups
acrossregions and centuries paid due
lip-service all while exhibiting variations and going through changes. Thus,
that is why the scripture-based fourfold Varna (“caste”) system figured far more
prominently in the Western image of Hindu society than the real-life
thousandfold Jati (“caste”) system.

The corrective that Hindu society was too readily seen as
changeless may have been the most important message in her lecture, seemingly
trivial but full of consequences for both Hindus and practising Orientalists.
In this case, the colonial-age Orientalists, with Weber in their wake, may have
borrowed their extremely static view of Hindu culture from the Hindus themselves.
Allow me to improvise an example.

The “Hindu caste
system”

When the Ambedkarites and their Western cheerleaders anchor
the caste system, complete with untouchability, in the Rg-Veda’s Purusha Sukta,
they are wrong; yet, they are only following a traditionalist Hindu view that
prevailed during the past few centuries. The box-type caste Apartheid with
caste endogamy of the Puranic and early modern era was nowhere to be seen in
the Rg-Veda: the earlier family books don’t report any trace of it, and the
Purusha Sukta in the late Book 10 only reports the existence of four distinct
functions in a complex society. After that, the caste system gradually hardened
with a stage of hereditary caste only in the paternal line (as with the Brahmin
Vyasa, son of the Brahmin Parashara and the fisher-girl Matsyagandha; and as
with the sons of Dasis who were recruited into the Brahmin caste, mentioned
here by Prof. Thapar), and finally endogamy. Equating Hinduism with the classical
caste system, as is the wont of the Christian missionaries, the Ambedkarites
and many an Orientalist, makes the mistake of disregarding change in Hindu
history, but this mistake is based on Hindus having made the same mistake. For
some two thousand years, any trespass against or doubt regarding the fully
grown caste system was condemned with an invocation of the Rg-Veda’s authority,
as if the Purusha Sukta had described the kind of caste system with which later
Hindus were familiar.

(It deserves mention here that Prof. Thapar has personally
contributed to our awareness of change within Hindu social structure. She has
edited the bookIndia. Historical Beginnings and the Concepts of the
Aryan, 2006, in which Marxist
historian Shereen Ratnagar asserts,
p.166: “if, as in the case of the early Vedic society, land was neither
privately owned nor inherited by successive generations, then land rights would
have been irrelevant to the formation of kin groups, and there would be nothing
preventing younger generations from leaving the parental fold. In such societies
the constituent patrilineages or tribal sections were not strongly corporate.
So together with geographic expansion there would be social flexibility.” It
has become fashionable to moralize about the caste system, with evil Brahmins
inventing caste and then imposing it on others; but hard-headed Marxists don’t
fall for this conspiracy theory and see the need for socio-economic conditions
to explain the reigning system of hierarchy or equality. The pastoral
early-Vedic society did have the conditions for a more equal relation between
individuals than the more complex later Hindu society.)

Other factual inaccuracies in Weber’s work include the total
disregard for the presence of Islam in India, like for that of Buddhism in
China, because their foreignness jeopardizes Weber’s explanation of India’s
economic performance as stemming from the Indian religions. The different religions
were treated as self-contained, not porous. The Indian state was described as
agricultural, while recent studies corrected this: there was much commerce,
including maritime, and this had only increased with urbanization after the
year 1000. Weber also exaggerated the power of karma beliefs to reconcile
people to social misfortune. The peasantry often responded to crises by migration,
and sometimes even by that supposedly un-Indian behaviour: rebellion. They
didn’t wait for the next birth to better their circumstances.

Trade was not despised, and even Brahmins and ascetics
involved themselves in it, e.g. in the horse trade. Labour division between
castes was more flexible than used to be thought. In the century before Weber,
the static view of caste was conspicuously challenged by the anti-Brahmin
movements and by the upper-caste reform movements. Even a non-specialist could
have been more aware of these developments.

Conclusion

So, let us sum up. Max Weber’s world exists no more, and
even the terms of the debate have been altered. Are the categories of religion
used by Weber (and likewise by Marx) still valid? They strike us now as
context-free and innocent of the changes that took place. Today, this
non-change view is regarded as ahistorical. Weber would have been better if he
had compared the same period in East and West, rather than comparing apples
with pears: timeless societies in the distance with the familiar recent stage
of Western society.

We remain stuck with the large question: what prevented Asia
from taking the lead in knowledge? Why was the lead grabbed by Europe, after
having lagged behind for so long? More was required for this than the Protestant
work ethic. And another question, rather trivial but appropriate on this
occasion: how would Max Weber have seen the religion of India a hundred years
later?

Afterthought

So much for the Weber lecture. People who know something of
the Ayodhya controversy may be surprised to learn that afterwards, I had a few
friendly interactions with Prof. Thapar. Remembering the flak I drew in India when
I took my erstwhile Aryan Origins adversary Michael Witzel’s side in the
controversy that followed the publication of his book on Global Mythology, I
will take the trouble to explain.

Firstly, it is all rather long ago, about a quarter century.
Back then, she took a leadership role in the secularist plea that there was no
basis for historans to accept the belief that a Hindu temple had stood at the
site of the Babri mosque in Ayodhya. In the dominant political and academic
circles, that position suddenly became a consensus, and I stood out by challenging
it. But that debate has been settled, definitively with the Court-ordered
excavations in 2003, which laid bare plenty of remainders of the temple. When
the war is over, soldiers go home, and let the war psychology which had
animated them on the battlefield, subside.

I will not mention the names of some Hindu and some
anti-Hindu scholars who are still repeating quite exactly what they said
decades ago, especially in the Aryan Origins debate. They foam at the mouth
when they argue their point, and keep on doing so. But for better or for worse,
I am not like that. So, the second reason is that I really don’t believe in
personalizing debates on specific issues. Admittedly, I was not quite immune to
that tendency when I was younger. But gradually, you not only know in theory,
but also realize in practice, that human relations should not, or as little as
possible, be affected by controversies. Even in controversies that I find
myself in today, I endeavour to stay on friendly terms with my adversaries.

Number three is the reason of principle, that I want
henceforth to guide all my dealings with adversaries. As Socrates said, the
root of everything deemed evil is ignorance. People who objectively do evil,
subjectively believe they are doing the right thing, because somewhere they
have picked up a mistaken idea of what constitutes right, or of what exactly it
is that they are doing. There is no need to intensify the impression that they
are evil, it is more helpful to make them see reason, and automatically they
will correct their position; for it is not in eagerness to do the right thing
that they are lacking.It also helps to
remain aware that you yourself with all your good intentions seem likewise to
be on the wrong side from your adversaries’ viewpoint. That is no reason to
assume all positions are equal, or to drop your own convictions, but it will
help you to better understand how anyone could have taken the opposite position
to your own.

Meanwhile, on the lawn outside the SOAS gate, there is a
statue of the Tamil poet Thiruvalluvar. It carries a translated quotation of
his, which I would like to reproduce as my parting shot:

“Meet with joy, with pleasant thoughts part,/ Such is the
learned scholar’s art.”

Monday, September 5, 2016

All known civilizations have a thing called “god”, plural or
singular. They are a category of beings deemed endowed with far more power and
a vastly larger longevity than us human beings. For the rest, their characters
and functions may vary.

In writing, the idea of “a god” is first attested in the
Sumerian ideogram Dingir, which has
the physical form of a radiant star. It certainly has the meaning “god”, for it
is used as the common determinative for a whole class of names signifying gods.
That, indeed, was anciently how a divine being was conceived: as a radiant
heaven-dweller. In Babylon and in Harran, each planet was worshipped in a
temple of its own.

The pre-Islamic religion was also largely star worship (next
to ancestor worship and the worship of special stones like the Black Stone in
Mecca’s Ka’ba). Thus, the three
Meccan goddesses of Satanic Verses
fame, al-Lāt, al-Uzza and al-Manāt, are
roughly the Sun, Venus and the Moon. The Ka’ba
was dedicated to the moon-god Hubal,
and housed a stone fallen from heaven.

Stars were explicitly recognized as gods by prominent
philosophers like Socrates and Plato. Some dissident freethinkers however, like
the philosopher Anaxagoras and the playwright Aristophanes, thought stars were only
burning rocks. After Christianization, when all divinity was invested in an
extra-cosmic Supreme Being, the planets were desacralized and reduced to
cogwheels in a cosmic machinery set in motion by the Creator and operated by
his angels. Though numerically, a large part of humanity now espouses this
desacralizing view, it is rather exceptional in the history of religions. The
association of gods with stars was pretty universal.

Other properties of a
god

Because a star is radiant and stands in heaven,
near-permanently visible to all, it is a part of our collective consciousness,
our shared frame of reference. This, then, is the operative meaning of “a god”
in human life: the personification of an important collective factor difficult
to negotiate, and which you have to take into account in the things you plan to
do. Thus, Dyaus = heaven, Agni = fire, Indra (“the rainer”) = storm; Vayu
= wind, Pṛthivī (“the broad one”) =
earth. This principle is then generalized, and gods can be personifications of
any category of beings. Thus, Śiva is
the personification of the renunciants, unkempt and living in the mountains.

A god is powerful in that he can impact your life. But he is
not all-powerful, because he has to share his power with other gods. Rarely if
ever is he seen as “the Creator” who stood outside the universe and fashioned
it from nothing. Rather, he himself is a part of the universe. Creation is
normally seen as only a transformation from formless matter to the present
world of form, and in that process, gods may play their part. In that limited
sense, the Vedas and Puranas have plenty of “creation” stories. Yet they also
assume that the universe as a whole has always been there, though it cyclically
becomes unmanifest, only to reappear again. It is an exclusively
Biblical-Quranic belief, further propagated by thinkers who elaborate the
Biblical or Quranic assumptions, that a single Supreme Being, in a single
moment never to be repeated, created the whole universe from nothing.

Gods are imagined to be endowed with personalities befitting
the element of which they are the personification. As such, they are also
sensitive to gifts and flattery, and may thus be influenced into exercising
their power in a partisan, friendly way. That is why people who would never
think of appeasing the stormy sea, do devise rituals to appease the sea god,
hoping that he will guarantee smooth sailing.

Finally, a star or god is also, as far as a mortal can tell,
eternal: it existed before we were born and goes on existing after we have
died. As suggested by the extreme longevity of the physical stars, gods are
proverbially deemed immortal. Hence the binary: us mortal earthlings versus the
immortal heaven-dwellers.

Deva

The same meaning of “star”, “radiant heaven-dweller”, is
present in Vedic Sanskrit Deva, “the
shining one”, hence “a god”. It is also etymologically present in cognate words
like Latin Deus, “a god”. One of the
Sanskrit terms for “astrologer”, at least since its mention in a 4th-century
dictionary, is Daiva-jña, “knower of
the gods”, or in practice, “knower of destiny”. Another is Daiva-lekhaka, “gods-writer”, “destiny-writer”, i.e.
horoscope-maker. Obviously, the stars here were seen as gods regulating man’s
destiny.

A parallel development, but omitting (or only implying) the
original link with the stars, is found in Slavic Bog, “the share-giver”, “the apportioner”, “the destiny-decider”,
related to Sankrit Bhaga, and hence
to the derivative Bhagavān. Other
god-names are more derived from the practice of worshipping, such as the
Germanic counterpart God, “the
worshipped one”, Sanskrit Huta; or
the Greek counterpart Theos, “god”,
related to Latin festus, “festive”; feriae, “holiday”, i.e, “religious feast”;
and to Sanskrit dhiṣā, “daring,
enthusiastic”, dhiṣaṇā, “goddess”, dhiṣṇya, “devout”. But even here, a
stellar connection reappears, for the latter word is also a name of Śukra/”Venus”.

More examples of the personification of heavenly phenomena
as gods are found throughout the Vedas. The deities Mitra and Varuṇa
represent the day sky (hence the sun, here remarkably called “the friend”) c.q.
the night sky, with its stable sphere of the fixed stars, with its regular
cycles representative of the world order. The Nāsatyas or Aśvins (“horse-riders”)
are thought to represent the two morning- and evening stars, Mercury and Venus,
who “ride” the sun, often likened to a horse. Uśa (related elsewhere to Eōs,
Aurora, Ostara, and hence to “east” and “Easter”) represents the sunrise.

The Vedic gods were personifications of natural forces, with
whom you could do business: do ut des,
“I give to you” through sacrifice, “so that you give to me” the
desire-fulfilment I want. That type of relation between man and god is pretty
universal. That was the ancient worldwide conception of gods. But in auspicious
circumstances, religion was to graduate from this stage, and the gods would go
beyond the stars.

Transcending the
stars

Hindus often react to the above-mentioned view as insufficiently
respectful to Hinduism. They insist that it is a Western “Orientalist”
fabrication to see the gods as mere personifications of natural forces. In
foreign countries, perhaps, but not in India. They think it treats religion as
essentially childish, for in children’s talk, or in that by mothers towards
children, there is a lot of personification. Yet, we insist that in the Vedic
stage of civilization, this conception of gods still prevailed; perhaps already
as a rhetorical device built on top of an earlier more primitive stage, but
still sufficiently present to leave numerous traces. It shows a deficient sense
of history to project the newest insights of Hinduism back onto its past, and
to deny the amount of change that has taken place in the conceptual history of
Hinduism.

But then two things happened. The first is that from the
Upanishads onwards, in a distinctively Indian development, the notion of
Self-Realization or Liberation arose. The way to this goal, the Sādhana or what is nowadays called “the
spiritual path”, is not about the fulfilment of desires; instead, the point is
to decrease your desires, to renounce, to abandon. This was initially conceived
as a process in which no god or other being played any role (whether they were
deemed to exist or not), making way for a focus on the Self (ātman), equal to the Absolute of pure
consciousness (brahman). This
Absolute was conceived as being above the pairs of opposites, as devoid of
characteristics (nirguṇa). Gods were
relegated to the background, to the world of desire-fulfilment through rituals.
Self-Realization implied renunciation from desire-fulfilment, and hence a
distance from the gods and their favours.

The second development is that the gods persisted or were
revived, but in a transformed role. Stellar references are explicit in the case
of Sūrya, the sun, and of Soma/Candra,
the moon; but less so in the case of Viṣṇu,
“the all-pervader” (like the sun’s rays), though he has a solar quality; and Śiva (“the auspicious one”, an apotropaeic
flattery of the terrible Vedic god Rudra,
“the screamer”), the Candradhāra or
“moon-bearer”, the Somanātha or “lord
of the moon”, has a lunar, nightly quality. The classical Hindu gods Viṣṇu and Śiva represent a revolution vis-à-vis the Vedic worldview. You
don’t bring sacrifices “for Liberation” to the Vedic gods, a notion
presupposing renunciation from those
desires. By contrast, the later “Puranic” gods of classical Hinduism take some
distance from the naturalist meaning in which they originate, and do integrate
Liberation. Very soon, devotional-theistic movements adapted this new notion to
their cult of Viṣṇu, Śiva or Śakti (or elsewhere, Amitābha
Buddha or Avalokiteśvara), gods
with a distinct personality (saguṇa)
but more spiritual. In Kashmiri Shaivism, Śiva
gets abstracted as pure consciousness, Śakti
as pure energy. With these gods, you could “unite” so as to terminate your
susceptibility to worldly suffering, to delusion, to the karmic cycle. They
would grant you Liberation, just like the Vedic gods would grant you
wish-fulfilment.

But that doesn’t mean Hindus have given up on
wish-fulfilment. They still perform rituals to help them get what they want,
and often this involves explicitly stellar gods, but conceived as lower gods or
“demi-gods”. Astrologers instruct their clients to say prayers before the
planet that disturbs their horoscope. The client will get advice on what ritual
to practise, when and how and for which god, to ward off the negative
influences of the stellar configurations indicated in his horoscope. This will
remove the obstacles to his well-being and the fulfilment of his desires. The navagraha or “nine planets” (sun, moon,
their two eclipse nodes, and the five visible planets) as a whole are a normal
object of worship.

Mono- versus
polytheism

The Sumerian ideogram Dingir
was read as El In neighbouring
Akkadian, a Mesopotamian dialect of Semitic. We know this word very well
through Hebrew, a northwestern (Levantine) dialect of Semitic. Thus the names Uriel, “my light is God”; Gabriel, “my strength is God”; Michael, “who is like God?” But as we
shall presently see, these names now carry a meaning of “God” that has resulted
from a revolution, viz. from poly- to monotheism.

A derivative of El
is Eloha, “a deity”, “a god”. We know
it mainly through the plural form Elohim,
“gods”, “pantheon”. Strangely, this form has survived the theological
revolution described in the Bible book Exodus
under the leadership of Moses, ca. 1250 BCE. Here, the many gods were replaced
with a single jealous god, yet the plural form Elohim remained but with a singular meaning: God. Thus, the Bible,
which received its definitive form only under the Persian empire ca. 500 BCE,
when this usage was well-established, starts with the sentence: “Berešit bara Elohim et ha-šamaim ve-et ha-aretz”,
“In the beginning God created the heavens and the earth.” The connection with
the stars was severed, at least for the Israelites, not all the other nations: “Pay attention lest ye lift your eyes up to the sky for
seeing sun, moon and stars, that ye be led astray and adore and serve them,
those whom the Lord your God hath assigned to all the nations under
heaven." (Deut. 4:19)

A synonym of Elohim,
referring to the same jealous God, is Yahweh.
Moses himself introduced this god-name into Biblical tradition. Though new to
the Israelites after centuries in Egypt, it must have existed earlier among the
Arab (South-Semitic) Beduins as well as among the Northwest-Semitic people of
Mari. Moses, when a fugitive from Egyptian law after he was found out to have committed
murder, stayed with a Beduin tribe. They had a storm-god Yahweh, best translated as a causative participle of a verb meaning
“to move in the sky”, whether “to blow” or “to stoop like a bird of prey”, from
an Arab root HWY later attested in the Quran (22:32), but not in the Bible.
This meaning is confirmed by the fixed expression Yahweh Sabaoth, “he who
causes the motion of the heavenly hosts”, i.e. of the majestic procession of
the stars across heaven. Here again we find a stellar meaning associated with a
god-name.

Moses saw an apparition of this god in the burning bush. When
Moses asks the god who he is, the god expresses his total sovereignty: “I am
who I am”, ehyeh ašer ehyeh.
Theologians and translators have contemplated this sentence profusely, until in
ca. 1900, the German Orientalist Julius Wellhausen hit upon its probable
original meaning: it elaborates a pun on the name Yahweh, which the Hebrews misinterpreted folk-etymologically as a causative
participle of the verb HYY, “to be”, hence “the being one”, “he who is”, or
more philosophically, “he whose essence is existence” “he who necessarily
exists”, “he who causes existence to exist”. This edifice of profundities is
entirely built on a folk-etymological pun, nothing more. Or to put it more
positively: a new conception of the divine was grafted onto an old god.

The Arab form of the originally polytheistic term ha-eloha, “the deity”, is al-Ilāha, also “the deity”. A contracted
form is Allāh, “thé deity”, “the god
par excellence”, hence “God”. Originally it could refer to any
earlier-mentioned god. Thus, Mohammed’s Pagan father was called Abdallāh, “servant of the deity”. Mohammed,
in a bid to establish monotheism among the Arabs, reinterpreted Allāh as a synonym of Yahweh. He saw himself as the latest
(and even last) one of the line of the prophets of Yahweh, renamed Allāh in
Arabia. This way, the star-god El,
the Semitic form of Sumerian Dingir, ended
up shedding his connection with the stars and becoming the disembodied
extra-cosmic Creator-god Yahweh/Allāh. The Quran (6:78, 22:18, 41:37)
simply and strictly prohibits star worship.

In the footsteps of the reform movements Brahmo Samaj and
Aryan Samaj, many anglicized Hindus claim that “Hinduism too is monotheistic”.
This is a very defensive stand, and it is simply not correct. If the Hindu
wealth of gods and of ways of worship were not polytheistic, what other
religion would be? It seems to us that they are using a word they don’t
understand. Monos does not mean “one”,
it means “alone”, “one and no other”. Monotheism accepts only Yahweh or Allah,
and considers all others as false gods, only good to be destroyed and
discarded: Marduk, Ba’al, Osiris, Ahura Mazda, Śiva, Buddha. By contrast, Hinduism
is inclusive. The Vedic verse: “The wise call the one essence by many names”,
means that the different gods are not false but are essentially the same as
your chosen god. There are no “false gods” in Hinduism. Reality is both one and
manifold, and Hinduism is not bothered with the question whether the divine is
single or many.

This also counts for other Pagan civilizations. When
Protestant missionaries set up shop in China, they discovered that a native
term roughly meaning “God” was Shangdi,
so they appropriated this term as name of the Christian God. (Catholics
preferred Tianzhu, the “Heavenly
Boss”.) What they did not know, is that the Chinese language mostly does
without the separate category of a plural, so the same word can be both plural
and singular. Shangdi does not so
much mean “the Sovereign on High”, as rather “the Powers on High”. In Chinese,
even the grammar militates against the contrast between one and many. To
monotheists this numerical matter is all-important, worthy of the iconoclastic
destruction of all the “false gods”; but to regular people such as Hindus or Confucians
and Daoists, it is just not an issue.

Širk

Heaven-worship is truly the universal religion, rivalled
only by ancestor-worship. And even then, these two are intertwined. Deceased
ancestors are deemed to be in heaven, often actually associated with a specific
star. When your father has died, you take your child on an evening walk, and
when the stars appear, you point out one of them and say: “There is grandpa,
watching over us.” In a Vedic ritual, a zone in the sky, in the
Scorpio-Sagittarius area, is designated as the destination of the dead.

For famous people, who had become part of the collective consciousness,
the procedure could be to “elevate them to godhood” (Greek: Apotheōsis) by associating them with a
specific star or constellation. A case in point from antiquity is Antinoös, the lover-boy of the Roman
emperor Hadrian, who drowned himself and was given a star in Aquarius, still
named after him. When in the 17th century the southern sky was mapped, one
constellation was named after the protection given to Vienna by Jan Sobieski
against the Ottoman siege: Scutum
Sobieskii, “Sobieski’s shield”, now simply Scutum.

This practice was first attested in writing in Ugarit,
Syria, where in ca. 2000 BC famous people upon their deaths were identified or
“associated” with a star. In the native Semitic, this practice was named Širk, “association”. The term ought to
be well-known today, but with an evolved meaning. When Islam imposed
monotheism, it denounced polytheism and idolatry as Širk, i.e. the “association” of a mortal, a creature, with the
Supreme Being, the Creator.

India too has known this practice. The stars of the Great
Bear are named after the Seven Sages who composed most of the Ŗg-Veda. There
are different variations of this list of seven, but one of the Sages who
returns in all of them is Vasiṣṭha.
He and his wife Arundhātī are
associated with the twin stars Mizar and Alcor. In a moderate way, they did
graduate to godhood, with a few temples in Himachal and Uttarakhand dedicated
to them. Another sage who made it to heaven is Agastya, the Sage who went to
the South, and therefore has the southern star Canopus named after him.

Conclusion

At the dawn of history, and practically since the birth of
mankind, star worship, partly overlapping with ancestor worship, was the main
religion worldwide. With the development of civilization, conceptions of the
divine grew away from their referents in nature. India generated a spirituality
implying renunciation, and the gods followed suit. The Upanishads signalled a
break with the Vedic focus on the gods and reoriented mankind’s attention to
the spiritual path. A kind of relation with a kind of gods was restored, but
adopting the new focus on Liberation.

Star worship remained alive, as “nothing ever dies in India”
(in the words of the late Girilal jain), but that old layer was overlaid with
new levels of abstraction. The highest of these was the abstract concept of the
Absolute (Brahmaṇ) that appeared in
the Upaniṣads and remained, in
various guises, in the mai sects of Hinduism. But the lower levels, including
the naturalistic, star-related levels dd not disappear; it was an organic
evolution.

A roughly similar evolution took place in the Greek world
and then in the Roman empire. The elites outgrew the colourful pantheon and,
mainly through Stoicism, accepted a more abstract and more unitary concept of
the divine. In Neoplatonism, which may have been influenced by Indian
developments, everything was thought to emanate from “the One”. In China too,
“the One” was the name of a unifying abstract concept transcending the many
natural gods of everyday religion.

Unfortunately, in the Roman empire, this natural evolution
was interrupted and forcibly driven in a particular direction by the imposition
of Christianity. However, at the same time, to better insinuate itself in the
Greco-Roman culture, Christianity also took over much from Stoicism and
Neoplatonism, which appear mainly in Christian morals c.q. theology. The
breakthrough of monotheism followed the same pattern as the conceptual
development in Hinduism to a some extent, but was unnecessarily brutal and
destructive regarding the earlier religion. The same scenario repeated itself
even more abruptly with the advent of Islam.

The resulting concept of divine unity (in Islam: tawḥīd) was also much cruder than a what
gradual development would have made possible. While superseding the colourful
old gods, Yahweh or Allah were much like them in their negative aspects: all
too human, too personal, not nirguṇa,
“beyond qualities”. As India has shown, it was perfectly possible to move from
a naturalistic to a more abstract conception of the divine without destroying
the earlier conception.

About Me

Koenraad Elst (°Leuven 1959) distinguished himself early on as eager to learn and to dissent. After a few hippie years he studied at the KU Leuven, obtaining MA degrees in Sinology, Indology and Philosophy. After a research stay at Benares Hindu University he did original fieldwork for a doctorate on Hindu nationalism, which he obtained magna cum laude in 1998.
As an independent researcher he earned laurels and ostracism with his findings on hot items like Islam, multiculturalism and the secular state, the roots of Indo-European, the Ayodhya temple/mosque dispute and Mahatma Gandhi's legacy. He also published on the interface of religion and politics, correlative cosmologies, the dark side of Buddhism, the reinvention of Hinduism, technical points of Indian and Chinese philosophies, various language policy issues, Maoism, the renewed relevance of Confucius in conservatism, the increasing Asian stamp on integrating world civilization, direct democracy, the defence of threatened freedoms, and the Belgian question. Regarding religion, he combines human sympathy with substantive skepticism.